Estimating Your TOEFL Score

Practice Tests Don’t Come with An Official Score Report …

The Official Guide has a total of 3 practice tests: the three in the book are the same as the three on the accompanying CD. The tests that are printed in the book come with scoring guides to convert your score to the official 120-point scale, but on the CD-ROM you will only receive a percentage score and, in the case of open-ended questions (like the Writing section), sample answers and raters’ comments on them. If you took the test using the CD, simply use the scoring guides in the book to find your rough scaled TOEFL score (from 0 to 120).

Scoring the Listening and Reading sections is easy: simply look your raw points from each section then convert those numbers to the 30-point scale as follows using the charts in the answer sections of the book.

If you are using a test other than the three in the official guide, such as one from the book of five official practice tests, then you can use these percentages as a rough estimate of scores. Because each test should be scaled a little differently—every test is unique—the below conversion is not perfect, but it can give a rough idea.

Calculating TOEFL Scores Based on Percentage Correct

Percentage

Approximate Score

90-100

26-30

80-89

22-25

70-79

17-21

60-69

14-16

50-59

9-13

40-49

7-8

30-39

4-6

20-29

2-4

15-20

1

Below 15

0

This chart is only a guideline for your TOEFL scores, so if your percentage is in the middle of its class, just guesstimate the scaled score. For example, let’s say that I scored a 72% on Reading and 68% on Listening. My scaled Reading score would be about 18, and my scaled Listening score would be a 15 or 16.

For the Writing section, it gets a little fuzzier. Estimate your scores by comparing your essays to the examples given on the CD and noting what characteristics mentioned by the raters are also found in your essays. You will wind up with two numbers, each of which could be as high as 5. Add these together. Use the chart below to convert your score to the necessary 30-point scale (note that you will only get a score ending in .5 if you have two graders read your essays):

Raw Score

Score out of 30

0

0

.5

4

1

5

1.5

7

2

8

2.5

10

3

11

3.5

12

4

14

4.5

15

5

17

5.5

18

6

20

6.5

21

7

22

7.5

24

8

25

8.5

27

9

28

9.5

29

10

30

Again continuing with my example, let’s say that I gave myself a 4 on the independent task and a 3 on the integrated task. Added together, this is 7, so my writing score would be a 22.

The process for the Speaking section is similar to the Writing section; the only problem is that it’s harder to score yourself on speaking (this shouldn’t stop you from recording and critiquing your responses, though). If you know someone who can rate your speaking responses for you, then tell them that each of the six speaking tasks is worth a total of 4 points and show them the Speaking Scoring Rubric on pages 188-191 of the Official Guide. Once they’ve scored your responses, you can use the chart below to convert that score to the 30-point scale

Raw Score

Score out of 30

0

0

1

1

2

3

3

4

4

5

5

6

6

8

7

9

8

10

9

11

10

13

11

14

12

15

13

17

14

18

15

19

16

20

17

22

18

23

19

24

20

26

21

27

22

28

23

29

24

30

If you can’t get your speaking responses rated, then, as in the Listening section, use the sample answers and commentary provided in the section review to estimate your score.

If I continue my sample scores, I get the following results:

My TOEFL Score, Estimated

SECTION

RAW SCORE

ADJUSTED SCORE

Reading

72

18

Listening

68

16

Writing

7

22

Speaking

19

24

Don’t forget that although this estimation method is a useful tool, the score it gives you is not official. On the actual test, your final score will depend not only on the percentage of correct answers you give, but also on the relative difficulty of the particular test you took. So calculate your practice test scores and use them to measure your progress and preparedness, but don’t be surprised if your official score is a slightly different number. Hopefully this will point you in the right direction, and ultimately keep you from needing to retake the TOEFL because you didn’t estimate correctly.

The score conversion charts used in this blog come from a longer article on estimating scores to practice tests from The Michigan Guide to Teaching EAP Skills. Although the charts are virtually identical, the way that you will use them to score the practice tests from the Official Guide CD is slightly different from the way they are used in the original article. If you want to know more about their use in the Michigan Guide, click the link above to reach the original publication.

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About the Author

Kate has 6 years of experience in teaching foreign language. She graduated from Sewanee in 2012, where she studied and taught German, and recently returned from a year spent teaching English in a northern Russian university. Follow Kate on Google+!

I just gave my TOEFL exam yesterday. What my problem is my speaking section didn’t gone well. At 1st section of question it went worst due to some disturbance and second as well but from the 3rd question it slightly pickup the pace and I thought I spoke and response good than before. So, how does speaking marking goes? Out of 6 my 2 Question response went bad. I am feeling really worried about this. Although, my reading, listening, and writing section went well but speaking is doubtful.

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